Written by Mary Marr and Jessie Blalock, grand-daughter and great grand-daughter of Alice Victoria Saum

Alice Victoria Saum was born and grew up in an
area populated by members of her extended family. Fairfield County
was full of Dumms and Phillipses, and other of like ethnic
backgrounds (Pennsylvania Dutch and Alsatians). I suspect that it
must have been a happy and secure childhood, full of familiar folks,
and not materially lacking, as Ohio was good farming land, and
those of Germanic ancestry generally were very competent farmers
who could get a decent crop from the land.

Perhaps it was this sense of complacency that attracted Alice to
the man whom she would eventually marry - John Ernest Stermer was no doubt
well-known as being from the "wrong side of the tracks", as it was common
knowledge that he was illegitimate, and his mother had been cruelly tarnished
with the label of "whore" by a vindictive ex-lover (John's father), in

cahoots with a
corrupt retired police captain. One wonders why John Ernest did
not flee Lancaster at a very young age,

but it was probably due to a sense of responsibility to
his mother and his younger siblings that he stayed.

So Alice and John fell in love and were married, and it was only
then, after she began bearing children, that John's strong sense of
wanderlust overwhelmed him, and he rebelled against Alice's
wishes that he farm in Ohio by instead seeking employment with
one of the many petroleum drilling firms that had offices and
Lancaster, and shortly thereafter he was off, far away. First he
went to Mexico for a few years, after which he left under possibly
sinister circumstances. (Family legend says that it was his
financial assistance to the rebel Zapata that resulted in his being
expelled by the Mexican government and being declared "persona
non-grata".)

John made periodic trips home, often enough to keep Alice
steadily pregnant between 1896 and 1906, and then he made his
final journey, to Burma, where he died of disease in 1912.

After her husband died in Burma, the Ohio river flooded and tore
the Stermer house off the ground. The whole family climbed to
their roof and into the attic of a neighbor's house. Their house
rolled over and floated down the river. They stayed in that attic
three days. When the water subsided, Alice took the children to
St. Vincent's Orphanage in Columbus, Ohio. The insurance
company refused to pay Grandpa Stermer's insurance until
Grandma could PROVE he was dead.

She, being a good cook, went to work as the cook for a retired
diplomat. He helped her write all the letters and esablish her case.
The most helpful person was an American Baptist missionary who
had visited John Ernest in the hospital before he died and who had
conducted funeral services in the Rangoon cemetery for foreigners.
Then she was paid the insurance money - it took THREE years!.
She took the children out of the orphanage and moved to Fremont,
Michigan to live with her widowed brother Jacob
(he had four boys),
and to farm. None of those Stermer children EVER got over the
trauma of the orphanage.

Life finally improved for Alice once she got the insurance money,
and then freed her children from the clutches of the orphanage.
They all moved to Michigan, where they lived for awhile with her
brother Jacob. Alice opened a roominghouse, and fortune gave her
another chance when she met the man who was to be her second
husband, German-born Peter Schmidt.

Peter met Alice in the boarding house in Detroit she bought in
1922 with the insurance money. When they married, they moved
across the street to "their" house.

He had come from Triers in Western Germany. He spoke only
broken English. He was head of the General Motors design
laboratory doing research in body design and aerodynamics. He
had a very well-paid job, but they always lived in that modest
house. He was a very intellectual man and was exasperated with
the dreadful fighting the Stermer boys indulged in, so he bought the
Encyclopedia Britannica and he insisted that they "define their
terms" and learn to argue and present their ideas in an orderly
fashion. His European outlook was of great benefit and both
James and Leon especially revered his influence.

Alice and Peter had one child, Lucille Schmidt, born April
1926, and they lived a happy family life until Peter's death in Detroit in 1949.
By then Alice had two granddaughters, Mary and Judy, who also lived in Detroit,
upon whom she doted, and she was secure in the knowledge that all of her sons
were professionally successful, if a bit eccentric in some cases (for instance,
young John and his wife were nudists, and Joe was a proud member of the
Communist party).

In the 1950s, Alice moved to Arizona with her son Joe, and then
they settled in Los Angeles, where she died in 1964.